Today’s Cars Are Parked 95% of the Time

Reports of the death of car-buying among millennials turn out to have been greatly exaggerated. But there’s one big reason ride-hailing services like Uber, and eventually autonomous vehicles, are still a threat to private car ownership.

Put simply, we just don’t use our cars very much.

Transportation adviser Paul Barter has confirmed longstanding claims by urban planners that, on average, cars are parked 95% of the time. Barter tries three different approaches, first using data on the number of car trips and their average time, then survey results about the time we spend driving, and finally extrapolates from reports on the distance and speeds cars travel.

Each time, he arrives at 5% or less as the amount of time cars are actually in use.

Barter, like other urban planners, is most concerned with the strain that storing all those barely-used cars makes on cities. The shift away from mass car ownership, he says, would result in “huge parking space savings,” helping make cities denser, more efficient, and more liveable.

What Barter doesn’t point out is that not just the storage space, but the cars themselves, are being wasted under the current system. Sharing vehicles, either through existing services like Zipcar or Uber, or, eventually, through automated vehicles that could be summoned as needed, would lead to significantly lower overall spending on cars. That’s because while increased wear would of course give each car a shorter lifespan, a lot of vehicle wear, such as corrosion, actually takes place when a car is sitting still.

For more on the future of transportation, watch our video:

So even if the auto industry has recovered a bit from its post-recession nightmare of a generation of transit-loving, bike-riding hipsters, the future will probably include a big shift in spending away from the big hunks of steel that, mostly, just sit in the driveway.

Britain to Test Driverless Cars on Motorways Next Year

Britain said it will begin trialing driverless cars on motorways for the first time in 2017, as it moves toward its goal of allowing autonomous cars to take to the streets by 2020.

The government said last year there were no legal barriers to the technology being tested and gave the go-ahead for vehicle trials to start on some local roads.

Finance minister George Osborne will announce plans on Wednesday to test vehicles on motorways and say the government will bring forward proposals to remove regulatory barriers to the technology, the Treasury said.

“Naturally we need to ensure safety, and that’s what the trials we are introducing will test,” Osborne said in a statement ahead of his annual budget presentation.

“If successful, we could see driverless cars available for sale and on Britain’s roads, boosting UK jobs and productivity.”

The market for autonomous driving is worth 900 billion pounds ($1.29 trillion) worldwide, according to the government, but needs to overcome legal obstacles including determining who would be responsible in the event of an accident.

Driverless car testing will be restricted to vehicles with a person present and able to take control should the need arise, Britain’s Department for Transport has previously said.

On Friday, the top U.S. safety agency said there were still significant legal hurdles to be cleared before self-driving cars without steering wheels and gas pedals could be sold in the United States.

Alphabet Inc. unit Google GOOG wants to eventually be able to deploy fully autonomous vehicles without human controls, and major automakers are racing to develop vehicles that can drive themselves at least part of the time.

Kia Motors Is The Latest Automaker to Join the Self-Driving Car Craze

Self-driving cars are the new bandwagon, and Kia Motors just bought a ticket.

The automaker unveiled plans on Tuesday at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas to develop autonomous vehicles. But it may be a while before you see them.

Kia aims to have fully self-driving cars on the road by 2030 (yes, 14 years from now). However, the company hopes to have its first semi-autonomous cars with driver assistance on the road by 2020. These “partially” autonomous cars will have features like self-parking and automatic lane switching on the freeway.

Kia is apparently behind rival automakers like Mercedes Benz, Audi, Ford, and Tesla in building self-driving cars. It’s also trailing Google, which has been working on similar technology since 2012.

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To catch up in the driverless car race, Kia plans to invest $2 billion by 2018, the company said. It has also been granted a license by the sate of Nevada to test its autonomous driving technology on the state’s roads, and the electric Kia Soul EV will serve as guinea pig.

Along with autonomous driving tech, Kia is also adding new dashboard interface features, such as gesture control, fingerprint sensors, and smart-device connectivity. Its “blind control” feature automatically sets drivers’ preferences after it scans their finger prints. Drivers can also then control car settings using gestures. Gesture control has become an increasingly popular feature, with automakers like BMW and Volkswagen building their own.

The (Other) Transportation Tech to Watch in 2016

As the Verge put it on Monday, 2015 was the year we learned that Silicon Valley is coming after the transportation industry. The momentum behind ride-hailing apps, driverless cars, and electric vehicles has become so powerful that their dominance can feel inevitable.

But who are the Teslas TSLA and Ubers of 2016—the unicorns still waiting for their horn, the ideas still inching their way towards reality? Here are just a few of our nominees.

Hyperloop – It’s still a longshot that we’ll ever see Elon Musk’s 2013 whitepaper become a functioning superfast transit system, but 2015 saw a huge uptick in investment and talent devoted to the project. 2016 is going to provide at least one more major step forward—the SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition, which will gather university teams in Texas, and later California, to share ideas about pod design.

WATCH: Learn more about the Hyperloop.

Skytran – Arguably as cool as the Hyperloop, but with fewer technical hurdles, this system of elevated, magnetically-driven pods is scheduled to have a working demonstration system in Tel Aviv by the end of 2016. The technology emerged from NASA, so it’s got a good pedigree—though, as with Hyperloop, there are questions about whether it can move enough people to dent congestion.

Arx Pax Hover Tech – Speaking of the Hyperloop and NASA: In 2015, Arx Pax went from a loopy little mag-lev startup who funded a hoverboard on Kickstarter, to a NASA development partner with an ambitious mission to transform a half-dozen sectors with mag-lev technology. They also reportedly raised an additional $3.8 million, partly from Moonshots Capital, who have also held stakes in Ridescout, TrueCar, Pandora P, and LinkedIn LNKD. Arx Pax’s next big push is towards partnering with teams at the Hyperloop competition, where they’re hoping mag-lev can beat out the original whitepaper’s iffy air-hover proposal.

Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communication – Always-on wireless communications between cars, and between cars and infrastructure, will almost certainly spread more quickly than driverless cars, while providing a lot of similar benefits in safety and efficiency. The Department of Transportation is expected to release its rules for V2V in early 2016, which will hopefully push the auto industry closer to a true standard. It’s possible those rules will include a mandate to push for faster adoption. Another big question is how and when V2V data will be gathered, who owns it, and what they get to do with it.

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PhunkeeDuck – That other “hoverboard,” a two-wheeled micro-Segway that became one of 2015’s hottest trends, was actually marketed under a variety of badges. PhunkeeDuck was just the company that got the most mileage out of it, with celebrities like Jamie Foxx, Chris Brown, and Wiz Khalifa name-checking them all over social media.

But as NPR’s Planet Money discovered, the scooter-whatever-it-is emerged semi-organically from China’s tech underground, and there are no discernible patents in place, making it easy to find cheap knockoffs. That means sustaining both interest and profits in 2016 is a big question for companies like PhunkeeDuck. It might not help that the non-Instagram use cases are somewhat limited.

Apple hires yet another driverless car expert from Tesla

Apple has yet to acknowledge the rumors that it’s working on some sort of car — or even automotive technology of sorts — but the clues keep racking up.

On Friday, Reuters reported that Jamie Carlson, a former senior engineer from Tesla, has joined Apple according to his LinkedIn profile, which simply says he’s working on a special projects team at the company since August. Carlson was previously an “Autopilot Firmware Manager” at Tesla, meaning he worked on the company’s autonomous driving technology.

Apple has hired a steady stream of people with relevant experience, such as Megan McClain, previously a Volkswagen engineer with expertise in automated driving, graduate researcher Vinay Palkkode who came from Carnegie Mellon, Xianqiao Tong, a former Nvidia engineer who worked on computer vision software for driver assistance systems, and Paul Furgale, the former deputy director of the Autonomous Systems Lab at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, as the Wall Street Journal reported.

It’s still pretty unclear what exactly Apple is working on. Along with its notorious secrecy, Apple also often experiments for a bit before a final product direction emerges. While it could be building an entire driverless car, Apple could also en up focusing on the autonomous driving system itself and partner with an automaker, or even build an after-market product. Documents recently surfaced that show that the company has been in touch with GoMentum, a former naval base near San Francisco that’s being turned into testing facilities for driverless vehicle testing.

Alphabet — the new holding company of Google — has been working on its own driverless car for quite some time, and its cars has been tested around Mountain View, Calif., and more recently Austin. Traditional automakers like Lexus have also joined the race in building driverless cars, further adding motivation for the iPhone maker to joined in.

The 12 disruptive tech trends you need to know

People pay plenty of money for consulting giants to help them figure out which technology trends are fads and which will stick. You could go that route, or get the same thing from the McKinsey Global Institute’s in-house think-tank for the cost of a new book. No Ordinary Disruption: The Four Global Forces Breaking All the Trends, was written by McKinsey directors Richard Dobbs, James Manyika, and Jonathan Woetzel, and offers insight into which developments will have the greatest impact on the business world in coming decades. Below, we’re recapping their list of the “Disruptive Dozen”—the technologies the group believes have the greatest potential to remake today’s business landscape.

German automakers will acquire Nokia’s mapping unit, HERE

The coalition of German carmakers — Audi, Daimler, and BMW — will acquire Nokia’s mapping unit, HERE, according to mediareports.

The carmakers have reportedly agreed to pay about €2.5 billion ($2.71 billion), not quite the $3-4 billion figure mentioned in previous talks between the company and other buyers. Earlier in the month, the automakers had reportedly reached a hurdle in their negotiations with Nokia over the price and structure of the deal.

Other interested parties included Uber and China’s Baidu, and a group led by Chinese social network Tencent, though both dropped out of the race.

Already customers of Nokia’s mapping business, the automakers had an advantage over other bidders. HERE provides mapping data to about 80 percent of cars with in-dash navigation systems in North America and Europe, as Bloomberg notes. Nokia built out this business unit largely through its acquisition of Navteq Corp. for $8.1 billion in 2008.

A backbone of self-driving cars, mapping technology is one of the key components car makers are currently focusing as they — and even tech giant Google — are looking ahead at next wave of cars. Though much of the buzz has been around Google’s driverless car project, traditional automakers, including Tesla, have publicly discussed plans for self-driving car technology.

The deal is expected to close soon, and be announced possibly as early as July 31, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Bosch: In 2020, cars should be driving themselves on the freeway

In just five years, cars should be driving themselves on the freeway, as long as regulations can keep up with the advancing technology, according to German-industrial conglomerate Robert Bosch Group.

The forecast is in line with Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk’s prediction that the technology for fully autonomous cars—those that require no driver supervision—will be ready by about 2020.

For Bosch, this should mean deeper investment—and greater revenues—in driver assistance systems, as well as development of advanced automated driving products, something its engineers have been working on since 2011 at locations in Palo Alto, California and Abstatt, Germany. The company’s mobility unit—by far its largest business sector in North America—provides technology for automobiles, as well as off-highway applications, two-wheelers, shipping, and rail transportation.

The boom in driver assistance systems, such as predictive emergency braking and lane departure warnings, is propelling the industry towards automated driving. For instance, Bosch’s sales in driver assistance systems is already increasing by a third every year, according to Dr. Dirk Hoheisel, a member of Bosch’s board of management. Sales in this field are expected to exceed 1 billion euros (about $1.09 billion) in 2016, Hoheisel says.

Earlier this month, Bosch reported that its mobility business unit—which has a customer list that includes Google, Tesla Motors, and Porsche—saw sales in North America grow nearly 10% to $8 billion in 2014. The mobility unit accounted for more than 70% of the $11.3 billion in total consolidated sales in the region.

Bosch has responded to demand by hiring hundreds of engineers to work on driver assistance tech. About 2,000 engineers are working on refining driver assistance systems at Bosch. That’s a good 700 more than just two years ago.

The progress toward self-driving cars could stall—or at least slow—if countries don’t create a legal framework at the pace of technological development. In many countries, highly automated driving—in which the system can handle all situations in a defined case, but the driver is ready to take the controls—isn’t legal thanks to rules outlined in the Vienna Convention on Road Traffic of 1968.

In the U.S., self driving cars are legal because they’ve never been outlawed. Eventually, the lack of federal rules will become an obstacle. It’s already prompted some states to come up with their own rules as companies including Google, Audi, Daimler and Tesla test automated driving tech. If Bosch’s prediction is going to come true, automated cars may first have to navigate a tangled web of state-by-state and country-by-country regulations, rather than swiftly take off under unified guidelines.

Uber wins, GM loses when driverless cars rule the road

In a society dominated by self-driving cars, U.S. auto sales might fall 40% and vehicle ownership could drop 50%, forcing entrenched automakers such as Ford Motor Co. and General Motors to adapt or die, according to a Barclays analyst report.

This shift will also create opportunities for tech startups and rental car companies.

The research report, “Disruptive Mobility” by Barclays plc analyst Brian A. Johnson, imagines how society would operate 25 years from now if everything stayed the same except that the majority of vehicles produced were fully autonomous.

Obviously, the report is more of a thought experiment—and one that requires us to make a number of assumptions. Still, the forecast illustrates how disruptive self-driving cars could be to the automotive and transportation industries. And with Google’s plan to introduce self-driving cars by 2020, this futuristic scenario doesn’t isn’t seem so far off.

So who wins and loses in this futuristic scenario? Does Uber ditch its drivers and become a fleet management company? Will Tesla’s entry into mass-market cars threaten its existence?

Even when driverless cars monopolize the landscape, Johnson predicts driver-required cars will still exist. These will be cars and light trucks owned for specific work purposes or for their performance—what’s the point of owning a McClaren 65OS Spider if you can’t drive it?

The Barclays report estimates a little more than 50% of cars in the U.S. are used for getting to and from work, and dropping the kids off at school. It’s in this purely commuter-daily routes space, where Johnson sees shared autonomous driving upending the auto industry.

Shared autonomous driving, or SAVs, would be like Uber without the driver—a fleet of robotic taxis capable of picking up a passenger who has summoned the ride with the touch of an app. Taking it a step further, pooled SAVs that pick up multiple riders at different points would also emerge.

The advent of driverless cars in dense urban areas like San Francisco would impact traditional taxi companies and taxi apps like Uber and Lyft, depending on how these tech-focused startups adjust. Uber and Lyft are, in many ways, prepared for this transition. The companies already use technology to connect drivers with riders and they both operate carpooling, or shared riding, services.

But in exurban areas and cities like Austin, Texas, which have a compact urban core and surrounding sprawl, the rise of shared autonomous vehicles could have an even bigger impact. Researchers at the University of Texas, who ran simulation models based on actual trips in Austin, found that every SAV on the road could displace nine traditional cars, according to the report. At the same time, each SAV would travel 63,335 miles, about five times the annual mileage of a traditional family car, the report says.

Winners and Losers

For consumers, the economics of SAVs, or transportation as a service, is a win. Barclays estimates the cost per mile for SAVs will be $0.34 a mile, nearly 58% cheaper than traditional new cars. Pooled SAVs, assuming two riders per trip, would push those costs down even more to $0.16 per mile.

For companies that make mass market cars, a driverless society would be far more challenging. From the Barclays report:

Just as horses have become either true beasts of burden (e.g. on a cattle ranch) or a rich person’s play-thing—we think of the Hampton Classic Horse Shows—we see a smaller auto market, with individually owned vehicles either for work purposes or for status/performance. For the rest, shared autonomous vehicles will replace individually owned cars, just as the Model T replaced the horse.

GM GM and Ford F will be impacted the most by these changes and will have to restructure in order to adapt, according to Barclays. Companies like American Axle, which have a large exposure to work trucks and status vehicles, will be relatively safe. Still, suppliers to traditional mass-market automakers and even those “safer” luxury performance vehicles, will be impacted. Fewer vehicles will mean lower demand for parts and only companies that can pivot and adjust to much lower volumes will survive.

Meanwhile, Avis Budget Group CAR, which acquired car-sharing startup Zipcar for $500 million in 2013, is well positioned if it becomes a manager of SAV fleets, says Barclays. Under that premise, Daimler AG, the maker of Mercedes-Benz, is prepared for the shift as well. In 2013, the German car company launched a mobility services subsidiary, where it now houses its moovel unit and car-sharing car2go brand. Car2Go, which connects members with Smart cars, has more than 1 million registered members in 29 cities around the world, according to the company. In the past year, it has also purchased startups RideScout and the mytaxi cab-booking app Intelligent Apps.

Barclays puts its biggest bet on low-end disruptors—startups like iStream that plan to build cheap electric vehicles designed for the car-sharing market and eventually shared autonomous vehicles. Other Barclays winners in this space include UK firm Riversimple, which is building a fuel-cell powered two-seater and plan to offer mobility as a service rather than sell its cars. Barclays is particularly fond of MobileyeMBLY, an Israeli company that makes chips used for advanced driver assistance.

Google GOOG is also well-positioned for the shift to driverless cars. Barclays sees Google offering software to traditional and new automakers, not producing the cars.

Meanwhile, Tesla Motors TSLA could be negatively impacted as its mass market cars lose out to SAVs, according to the Barclays report. While Barclays paints a precarious picture for Tesla, it should be noted that the company has a record of jumping at market opportunities and designing products that create massive demand where there previously appeared to be none.

Its battery tech, innovations in manufacturing and software—the essential ingredient for an effective autonomous car market—as well as its recent entry in the energy storage market all point to a company able to take advantage of a shift to driverless cars.

Considering the future, the pursuit of Nokia’s maps business makes sense. A transportation network company’s key interest will be to make sure it has a steady uninterrupted flow of map data, Johnson told Fortune.

“Mapping has emerged as the Spice of the disruptive mobility universe,” Johnson says.

Is Google planning to take on Uber?

Google GOOG is developing a ride-hailing service that could eventually rely on self-driving cars, Bloomberg reported Monday. The project would put it on a collision course with Uber, which in just a few years has seized a huge chunk of the existing taxi business.

There is no word on when a Google ride-sharing service would become available to the general public, though Bloomberg reported that the company is testing a version of the service with its employees.

Google’s potential move into the market comes two years after its venture capital arm, Google Ventures, led a massive 2013 investment in Uber that valued it around $3.5 billion. Subsequent funding rounds have valued Uber at more than $40 billion.

Concerned about Google’s possible entry, Uber is considering removing Google’s chief legal officer, David Drummond, from its board of directors, according to Bloomberg, which cited anonymous sources. Drummond has been a board member since 2013.

Meanwhile, Uber is moving forward with plans to develop its own driverless vehicle technology and is building a research facility in Pittsburgh to explore the idea, TechCrunch reported. Autonomous cars would let Uber avoid having to share money from passengers with drivers.

Uber did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Google responded to a request for comment with a link to a tweet the company posted in reply to Bloomberg: “We think you’ll find Uber and Lyft work quite well. We use them all the time.”

@business We think you'll find Uber and Lyft work quite well. We use them all the time.

A few months ago, Fortune wondered if Google and ride-sharing startup Uber might be on “a collision course” over dueling on-demand delivery services. But the two tech companies could be headed for an even bigger clash.

Uber has already made more than its share of enemies in a series of controversies including by ignoring regulators and taking on taxi companies, some of which have sued to stop the newcomer. Uber and ride-hailing service rival Lyft have exchanged public accusations while competing for customers and drivers. A number of passengers have also accused Uber drivers of questionable conduct, including a woman in Los Angeles who accused her Uber driver of sexually assaulting her this week.

In other words, a battle with Google would only be the latest conflict for Uber.

(UPDATE: This article has been updated to include a response from Google.)